BOOTH B13 – featuring works by Kerry Armstrong, Agneta Ekholm, Jessica Lichtenstein & Lionel Smit.
Art Central Hong Kong 2019
BOOTH B13 – featuring works by Kerry Armstrong, Agneta Ekholm, Jessica Lichtenstein & Lionel Smit.
Creating unordinary portraits of women, both representational and abstract, Lionel Smit sources his inspiration from the Cape Malay Community. Guided by influences of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Andy Warhol, he combines gestural brushstrokes, splattered and dripping paint, with patches of colour applied across the heads of his subjects. Smit’s sculptures invoke similar feelings to that of their two-dimensional counterparts, yet, a further addition of depth in its actuality, he imbues his pieces with less foreboding and melancholy. The opaque softness of the paintings is replaced with highly detailed hatching, clay protrusions, and grooved surfaces. The layers of intense colouring are reproduced as physically perceivable textures in this medium.
With a painting process refined over nearly three decades, I build layer upon layer of translucent and semi‑translucent layers, with moments of solid depth through controlled surrender, allowing chance and precision to coexist as images emerge slowly. Building, dissolving, and rubbing back the surface until a final image appears, each gesture becomes a kind of trace, of breath, of time, of inner terrain.